Awe experiences are self-transcendent. They shift our attention away from ourselves, make us feel like we are part of something greater than ourselves, and make us more generous toward others.
— Summer Allen, Ph.D.
I was unaware of the scientific pursuit of what it means to experience awe until I came across a reference to Dacher Keltner in Diana Butler Bass’ The Cottage while she was discussing awe and how it “threads throughout the scriptures. It whispers with creation and thunders in God’s mighty works. It sings its psalms in the Hebrew Bible. It is vocalized by Lady Wisdom. In the New Testament, it is often the emotional response of the disciples or the crowds who follow Jesus. There are entire experiences of awe reported — like the Transfiguration, the post-Resurrection appearances of Jesus, and the events attending the emergence of the new community of the Spirit in Acts.”
As Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Berkeley, explains in an interview, awe can take many forms: experiencing nature during a walk in the woods, noticing something for the first time after having passed by it countless times previously, or experiencing the effects of psychedelic drugs. One can experience awe when looking at a work of art, listening to music, or watching an evocative film.
Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.
— Abraham Heschel
Psychologists did not begin studying the emotion until 2002, but since then, interest in awe has taken off: “A majestic waterfall, the Taj Mahal, towering redwoods, the Grand Canyon, a tornado, Beethoven’s Symphony Number 9, Monet’s Water Lilies, a fractal, a spiritual experience, a performance by Prince, a child being born, a speech by Martin Luther King Jr., the view of Earth from space. What do all these things have in common?” asks Summer Allen, a research/writing fellow with the Greater Good Science Center. “They’re likely to induce one of the most mysterious and mystifying of emotions: awe.”
As she writes in a white paper on “The Science of Awe”, “Studies have shown that awe is often accompanied by feelings of self-diminishment and increased connectedness with other people. Experiencing awe often puts people in a self-transcendent state where they focus less on themselves and feel more like a part of a larger whole. In this way, awe can be considered an altered state of consciousness, akin to a flow state, in addition to an emotional state.”
Discussing the role of awe, she writes, “Experiencing awe may be adaptive because it encourages us to take in new information and adjust our mental structures around this information, helping us navigate our world and increasing our odds of survival. Finally, awe’s ability to make us feel more connected with others and to be more helpful and generous may have also helped ensure our ancestors’ survival and reproductive success.”
I have always been interested in the overlap between science and religion, believing that both have their place in our understanding of the world. Too many people place too much emphasis on one or the other, disregarding what each contributes to our ability to function in the world. Even worse, within each, there are people who focus on the differences, rather than what they have in common. In religion, for example, the different sects may violently oppose one another rather than recognize the truths they all share. In science, one discipline may hold strong beliefs about its findings that exclude the recognition of another sect’s legitimate discoveries. Such disagreements can lead to disastrous results, even wars, and undermine progress in the pursuit of spiritual or scientific knowledge.
If one allows awe to enter the consciousness, those disputes become petty, as one has a glimpse of a greater truth. Those who, like Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, the musician, activist, and actor better known as Sting, said of his experience with the plant-based psychedelic ayahuasca, he felt connected to everything, even pebbles and puddles on the ground. While he also said it was not a pleasant drug to take and he had to steel his courage each time, it relieved him of the sense of time.
Personally, I prefer the sense of awe I get from standing atop a mountain and taking in the view, or walking through a forest surrounded by birdsongs and wildlife. When hiking without conversation and being alert to one’s surroundings, a sense of awe inevitably settles over the mind. Emerging from such excursions, it is difficult to feel animosity toward anyone.
That is the most important thing: We are a fractured society, but if we open ourselves up to experience awe, we may be able to set aside our differences and focus on what we have in common.